In recent decades, the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire has decisively moved from the comfort of oversimplified, context-resistant, monolithic – and, if I may add, nation-state-centered – narratives towards a more nuanced appreciation of imperial plurality in the functioning of the state apparatus. Much ink has been spilled to transcend clear-cut dichotomies and essentialist categorizations that did not help but to further obfuscate the diverse social morphology in the twilight of the Empire. Albeit the progress hitherto made, studies of the late Ottoman bureaucracy have remained tethered to sweeping generalizations that have not been tested via a coherent body of quantitative data. Abdulhamit Kırmızı’s latest contribution offers a formidable intervention to this scholarly omission through a massive dataset of Ottoman officials, thereby replacing impressionistic orientations in qualitative research with a data-driven portrait of the late Ottoman administrative machinery.
Empire of Officials invites us to step into the bustling, vivid, multi-confessional corridors of the late Ottoman bureaucracy. Through a meticulous prosopographical analysis of over 50,000 officials, with a keen focus on the career trajectories of roughly 3,000 Christian and Jewish bureaucrats, Kırmızı reconstructs an administrative world where ethno-religious and communal identities did not collide so much as coalesce. The ever-widening bureaucratic web of the late Ottoman state was marked by an ethos of “collegiality.” Desks, languages, and patronage networks were shared across confessional lines, fundamentally challenging the zero-sum choice between imperial and national belonging. In other words, the administrative setting was less a theater of conflict and more a fluid fabric of intersecting loyalties.
The heartbeat of this study lies in the Sicill-i Ahvâl Defterleri (Personnel Registers), kept from 1879 to 1914. These 201 massive volumes represent one of the first systematic attempts by a modern state to “map boundaries, count, classify, and penetrate the population and its resources” (p. 63). For the historian, these registers are not merely bureaucratic ledgers; they are repositories of autobiographical fragments. Every entry reflects a tercüme-i hâl varakası (résumé paper) filled out by the officials themselves, documenting their birthplaces, fathers’ occupations, educational credentials, language skills, and the slow, rhythmic crawl of their promotions or the sudden jolts of their dismissals.
Kırmızı’s quantitative study reveals that non-Muslims constituted approximately 5.9 percent of the registered bureaucracy. Among these, Armenians formed the largest group (1,498), followed by Greeks (1,036) and Jews (303). This granular detail allows Kırmızı to challenge the “exceptionalist view” which suggests that non-Muslim employment was a rare anomaly or a frantic Tanzimat-era concession to European pressure. Instead, he discovers a somewhat coherent group whose careers were woven deeply into the Empire’s socio-political fabric.
The opening chapter determinedly roots the modern practice of employing non-Muslims in the deep soil of Islamic and Ottoman history. Kırmızı masterfully traces the employment of Christians and Jews back to early Islamic governance and the dhimma contract. Even in the classical Ottoman era, non-Muslims were indispensable as architects, physicians, and financial stewards, functioning as “members of the tax-exempt ruling class” (p. 35) without necessarily converting to Islam. Whereas the Greek Revolution of 1821 was a traumatic rupture that briefly halted this tradition, Kırmızı argues that the subsequent Tanzimat reforms, specifically the 1856 Reform Edict, did not so much initiate a new policy as accelerate and institutionalize an existing one. Perhaps the most sophisticated contribution of this chapter is the re-evaluation of the Hamidian era (1876–1909). Traditionally viewed as a period of pan-Islamist policies, Kırmızı demonstrates that it was, in fact, the pinnacle of non-Muslim bureaucratic expansion. In the Sultan’s palace, super-alafranga scribes worked alongside conservative Sufi sheikhs, and non-Muslims managed the Sultan’s private finances for decades (p. 56). This Hamidian bureaucracy was a meritocratic machine where loyalty to the dynasty and technical competence trumped communal identity.
Chapter 2 moves the focus from the Sublime Porte to the “margins” of the Empire, examining the delicate balancing act of local governance. Kırmızı explores how provincial councils and the appointment of non-Muslim assistant governors-general (vâlî mu‘âvini) were used as strategic tools to foster trust in public authority and resist European intervention, particularly in regions like Crete and Eastern Anatolia. In addition, the creation of the necessary human resources capacity in the periphery of the Empire was undoubtedly the sine qua non of bureaucratic transformation. Therefore, a significant proportion of this chapter is dedicated to the Mekteb-i Mülkiye (School of Administration), the premier training ground for the Empire’s professionalized administrative class. By hiring diverse professors and admitting non-Muslim students, the school became a “microcosm” of the broader Ottomanist project (p. 116).
In Chapter 3, the book returns to the statistical heart of the project, exploring the scale and institutional distribution of non-Muslim officials. Kırmızı corrects several historiographical myths, most notably the overemphasis on the employment of non-Muslims in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to their perceived prowess in foreign languages. While non-Muslims were indeed visible in diplomatic roles, the quantitative data shows that the majority were entered into the service through the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs (17.5 percent), the Ministry of Finance (14.3 percent), and local municipalities (9.7 percent) (p. 143). The chapter also examines municipal doctors, who graduated from the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Mülkiye (School of Civil Medicine), demonstrating that the number of non-Muslims in this institution eventually surpassed that of Muslims.
Chapter 4 tackles the widespread assumption that non-Muslim officials were categorically better educated than their Muslim peers due to a unique exposure to European educational systems. It shows that many non-Muslim bureaucrats were primarily products of the Empire’s own modernized public education system. Only a small fraction of Armenian (8 percent) and Greek (9 percent) officials were actually educated abroad (p. 187). The majority followed educational paths through millet schools and Ottoman state high schools (idâdî and sultânî), where they studied alongside their Muslim classmates.
The final chapter engages with the vital role of language, debunking the myth that non-Muslims were hired solely for their foreign language skills. Whilst French was the semi-official language of diplomacy, Kırmızı argues that Turkish was the “operational language” of the bureaucracy and a non-negotiable prerequisite for public employment. The 1876 Constitution formalized this, making eligibility for office conditional on a knowledge of Turkish (p. 189). Kırmızı briefly addresses the language question, presenting cases ranging from Jewish intellectuals, who launched societies to promote Turkish, to Greek tax collectors dismissed for their insufficient command of the script. The Armenian community’s success is highlighted through their commendable effort in mastering Turkish to a level where they published Turkish literary works, dictionaries, and legal commentaries. Nevertheless, despite their functional mastery, Armenians often faced linguistic stereotyping for their specific “Armenian Turkish” accent.
Kırmızı concludes with a poignant reflection on the legacy of these “Ottoman lives” lived in the “spaces-in-between.” As nationalism knocked on the door, the cognitive maps of these officials, which allowed for dual loyalty to the Sultan and one’s native group, began to scramble. The very individuals who had zealously defended the Empire against both internal separatism and European intervention were retrospectively transformed into figures of “fractured belonging” (p. 224). In the selective memory of successor nation-states, these loyal servants were stripped of their complexity and reduced to being exclusively Turkish, Armenian, Greek, or Jewish, often labeled as traitors or aliens by a historiography that could no longer comprehend the “transcultural selves” of the imperial era.
What is the Achilles heel of the book? Kırmızı is candid about the inherent fragilities and methodological boundaries of his study. A primary point of scholarly humility lies in his reliance on the Sicill-i Ahvâl registers, which are based on self-reported questionnaires. The data is thus susceptible to the subjective filters of the applicants because these records stem from the résumé papers “filled up and given in by the civil servants themselves” (p. 23). This is particularly evident in his analysis of linguistic proficiency, where he notes that one “cannot be certain whether [the] language skills were not exaggerated” (p. 209), as clerks often entered this information without requiring external documentation.
The book also recognizes its own geographical and chronological limitations. Kırmızı admits that the Ottoman state’s ability to count and classify was uneven. In distant provinces such as Yemen, Hijaz, and Iraq, the “counting was limited if done at all” (p. 120), which inevitably skews the granular data toward İstanbul and the Balkan and Anatolian heartlands. Thus, this spatial imbalance in the gathered data potentially masks local variations in bureaucratic practice in the frontiers. Moreover, the central registration process underwent a significant reduction after 1909, meaning that the post-revolutionary era is represented with less comprehensive density than the peak Hamidian decades. This disparity in the temporal distribution runs the risk of over-representation of the Hamidian regime, thereby eclipsing the bureaucratic tendencies of the Young Turk administration.
That being said, Empire of Officials should be given due credit since it offers a sophisticated glimpse into a “sunken world” where overlapping loyalties were an irrefutable reality and professional identity frequently superseded confessional affiliations. Metaphorically speaking, especially in its intellectual audacity, the book allows us to cast its author as a Nietzschean figure wielding a hammer against the long-standing idols of Ottoman historiography. Just as Friedrich Nietzsche sought to shatter the Socratic foundations of Western thought to uncover a more visceral reality, Abdulhamit Kırmızı strikes at the categorical taboos that have for too long ossified our understanding of the late Ottoman state.
